Mike King’s youth mental health charity Gumboot Friday will receive $6 million annually as a result of today’s three-party government coalition agreement.

King posted on Facebook today that the funding relieves such a heavy burden and “enables us to maintain our promise to continue providing our fast and effective free counselling”.

“I’ll admit there have been some happy tears today,” he said.

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Was the final deal a good one for National? How is Luxon feeling after his first press conference with Seymour and Peters? And what were the surprises from the coalition deal?

NZ Herald political editor Claire Trevett joins the final episode of On the Campaign as the country prepares for the new government to finally take office.

ANALYSIS

Incoming Prime Minister Christopher Luxon has managed to bring two other parties into a coalition Government without seeming to lose anything substantive in his own party’s core election promises.

Whether the agreed-upon policy platform will go ahead without a hitch, however, is an entirely different challenge, especially when it comes to paying for National’s tax cuts.

As with any MMP election - with the exception of the outlier result in 2020 - the emerging Government was always going to have to make compromises in order to cobble together a parliamentary majority.

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Incoming Deputy Prime Minister Winston Peters said he wanted a Covid-19 inquiry to begin "as soon as we can assemble it and get it ready to go. Ideally, we'd have it in 2024."

Speaking to Newstalk ZB's Heather du Plessis-Allan, Peters said the current inquiry was not comprehensive.

"It's already had one person left the inquiry because of concerns about that.

"We want to know why you would limit the terms of reference," he said.

Peters couldn't answer whether the current inquiry would continue alongside another.

Speaking on removing Treaty principles from current legislation, Peters said there was no requirement for them to be there in the first place, "so why would they be there?"

Peters said the "Treaty of Waitangi industry" was creating work for itself.

He said it wouldn't be complicated to remove Treaty principles from legislation, "we live in a computerised age".

"How can you have a waka on the road?" Peters said of Waka Kotahi NZTA going back to using an English name.

"Can we agree that all communication is about comprehension and understanding?

"It's back to Health New Zealand," he said of Te Whatu Ora Health New Zealand.

Peters said building a highway around the Brynderwyns was the party's No 1 priority.

He wouldn't be drawn on when this would be done either.

Speaking on transgender athletes in publicly funded sports, Peters said, "it's called fairness".

Prime Minister-elect Christopher Luxon said taking 10 days since special votes had been counted to negotiate the formation of a government wasn't a bad thing.

Speaking to Newstalk ZB's Heather du Plessis-Allan, Luxon said it was "not long at all, especially when you think of the Dutch taking 10 months to do something very similar and having the government fall apart after 11 months".

Luxon said getting every party to sign off commitments was exciting.

"We want to get into it," he said.

He promised there would be no changes to National's tax plan - "all that changes is the way we go about funding it because we agreed with New Zealand First not to pursue the foreign buyers tax".

"There's a number of policy changes and policies [in the agreement] that means you make additional revenue and make additional savings.

He said it was "no biggie" he had had to drop the foreign buyers tax.

"New Zealanders will get the tax relief we talked about delivering for them," he said.

Funding for those tax cuts would come from "little things", he said. He mentioned changing the fees-free scheme for tertiary education, saying it could save $100 million.

"These are a series of things that all add up. All in all, what people need to know is the tax programme has been committed to by all three parties.

Luxon said, "it was difficult before the election because everyone said you're not going to raise enough money, or you're going to raise too much money, the reality was we were relaxed about it going into negotiations because we said we'd build buffer into our fiscal plan".

He said the government wouldn't be borrowing money to fund the cuts.

He also said the regional infrastructure fund was different to the Provincial Growth Fund.

"Both National, Act and New Zealand First had commitments to investing in regional New Zealand, he said.

"What we've done here is this is a capital budget. It can only be spent on hard infrastructure. It's a lot smaller than what was agreed in the Provincial Growth Fund."

On the Treaty Principles Bill, Luxon said there was no commitment to support the bill beyond select committee.

"There is no further commitment from the Government beyond that," he said.

We want to strengthen democracy, we want equal citizenship - Luxon

On scrapping two iwi seats on the Environment Canterbury regional council, Luxon said, "we just don't think it's one person, one vote".

"We really said very clearly we want to strengthen democracy, we want equal citizenship, and those were positions of all three parties, essentially, before going into the election," he said.

Luxon said he was looking forward to returning to Auckland this evening and having a sleep-in tomorrow.

He said he gets up at 4.30am every day and tends to work quite late.

"As you can imagine, it's been a big job, turning the National Party around in the past two years. We managed to go to the campaign, and then the day after the campaign we started thinking about all this.

"I think this is pretty historic. It's really special. For the first time, we've got a three-party coalition government in New Zealand. We've got a situation where we've had every party sign up to the detail of the policy programme, we've agreed on the ways of working, and we've put the right people in the right places.

"This is what you spend the last three years in politics trying to do, is to make sure we can get to government."

Action on Smoking and Health NZ (ASH) says it is dismayed at the new coalition government’s announcement today that it will repeal the country’s Smokefree laws.

“We are shocked that one of the coalition's first health measures is to essentially grant a pardon to tobacco companies, and allow them to continue selling products that kill almost 5000 New Zealanders every year," ASH director Ben Youdan said in a statement.

“Repealing the Act puts the interests of the cigarette industry before the health of the nation. This will prolong the harm and suffering that smoked tobacco is causing to New Zealanders, especially those in the most vulnerable cohorts. 

"Māori and Pacific people suffer the majority of premature deaths and illness from smoking."

The coalition government also announced that it will introduce penalties for selling vapes to those under 18 and will consider a liquor licence being required to sell vapes. 

ASH said the move is a "distraction" from the fact that repealing the smoked tobacco retail cap, and denicotinisation laws will leave smoking tobacco for sale everywhere and will set back the fight to end smoking-related death and disease by years.